Sermon: Middle Ground
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Sermon: Middle Ground Texts: Luke 18:9-14; 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18 Date: October 28, 2007 Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church Oh, there ain't no bugs on me, on me. Oh there ain't no lobsters on me, on me There ain't no frogs on me, on me. Another classic from the annals of Great American Folk Music. We used to love singing this when I was a kid. It’s best, of course, as a competitive singing exercise with an opponent who sings that you’ve got what he ain’t got while you both make up rhymes. Works great with a smelly little brother as you gleefully and tunefully assert your superiority. Ain’t no flies on the Pharisee featured in Luke’s parable today. Maybe he was humming the song as he positioned himself for prayer in the temple that day. His prayer has an “ain’t no flies on me” flavor. He mentions the good religious things that he does—fasting and giving a tenth of what he earns to God’s work. And he also mentions the “mugs,” “guys,” “mobsters” and “dogs” that he’s thankful he’s not—robbers, evildoers, adulterers, tax collectors. I don’t know if there were any robbers, evildoers or adulterers in the temple that day, but there was a tax collector nearby who provided a nice foil for his extreme virtue. “God, I thank you that I am not like other men…like this tax collector.” You should know, before you leap to any premature conclusions about the Pharisee that he probably was a pretty good guy who devoted his life to doing the right thing. And although his prayer sounds grating to our ears, there were prescribed prayers in his tradition that he may well have been taught to pray that sound similar. The following prayer of thanksgiving from the Talmud was prayed by the rabbis on leaving (and perhaps entering) the house of study: I give thanks to Thee, O Lord my God, that Thou has set my portion with those who sit in the Beth ha-Midrash [the house of study] and Thou has not set my portion with those who sit in [street] corners for I rise early and they rise early, but I rise early for words of Torah and they rise early for frivolous talk; I labor and they labor, but I labor and receive a reward and they labor and do not receive a reward; I run and they run, but I run to the life of the future world and they run to the pit of destruction. [b. Ber. 28b (Soncino 1: 172), quoted in Hear Then the Parables by Bernard Brandon Scott] A similar ancient prayer is quoted by Scott from Eta Linnemann in Jesus of the Parables: R. Judah said: One must utter three praises everyday: Praised (be the Lord) that He did not make me a heathen, for all the heathen are as nothing before Him (Is 40:17); praised be He, that He did not make me a woman, for woman is not under obligation to fulfill the law; praised by He that He did not make me ... an uneducated man, for the uneducated man is not cautious to avoid sins. [t. Ber. 7.18] [p. 59] The form of his prayer is not that unusual, even though it sounds exceedingly snotty to us. Even so, I can’t say I have a warm feeling about that Pharisee even if he was taught to pray that way, thanking God for what he is not. I wouldn’t pray that way, would you? Of course not. Thank God we’re not like that Pharisee! Ooops… How about that tax collector? His prayer is pretty different. “God have mercy on me, a sinner.” Well, he’s probably right about that. Tax collectors were not civil servants like those among us who work for the IRS. They were independent owners of a franchise business. They contracted with the Romans to collect taxes from their own people. In return they kept a goodly percentage for themselves. They were rightly considered betrayers in cahoots with the brutal occupiers of their country. As Fred Craddock points out, we shouldn’t leap to the conclusion, just because Jesus says he was the one of the two pray-ers that was justified, that he was not a sinner. “The publican is not generous Joe the bartender or Goldie the good-hearted hooker. Such portrayals belong in cheap novels.” The tax collector’s prayer—“God have mercy on me, a sinner”--was most likely entirely appropriate. Was this a better prayer than the Pharisee’s prayer? I’d say yes, but a conditional yes. We could all afford to pray like the tax collector, because we are all sinners in need of God’s mercy and grace. However, suppose this is the only prayer this fellow ever prays. (I’m going to take a little poetic license with this character in the story now because I’m a fully licensed homeletician.) Suppose he goes out each day, extorts money from his starving compatriots for taxes to support the Roman war machine and to put bread on his own table, and at 5:00 every day he goes to the temple to pray the exact same prayer. Will his prayer help him grow spiritually any more than the Pharisee’s prayer helped him? It may be more likely to help him become a better person, but there’s no guarantee. Just wallowing in your own sin isn’t necessarily fruitful. The story says that the tax collector didn’t even lift up his head to look up at heaven while he prayed; he just kept his head down, beating his chest. But I bet he did look around a bit, out of the corners of his eyes. I bet he took stock of the others in the room with him, just like the Pharisee did. He noticed how many people were there who were not living the life of a despised collaborator like he was. He might have peeked at the Pharisee at told himself what an awful person he was in comparison to that obvious exemplar of Jewish faith. Pay attention to one of the few narrative details in this story. Both of these men were standing alone. “The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus…” “The tax collector, standing far off…” I think their physical location says something about their human experience. They were each distant from the general community of human beings. The difference was that one thought of himself as above the masses of people and the other saw himself as below them. Dag Hammarskjold’s had an interesting insight along these lines. He wrote, “Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe.”[1] I believe it’s quite a spiritual challenge to be humble in the way that Hammarskjold is defining humility—to avoid comparisons with others, to see oneself as neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller than anything else in the universe. His reflection on this reminded me of the poem “Desiderata” which made an impression on me when I read it as a young adult. The line from that poem by Max Ehrmann that has stuck with me all these years is, “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” It’s a very worthy goal to go through life without comparing yourself with others. Very difficult, but a worthy goal. I think one of the reasons both the Pharisee and the tax collector could be seen as spiritually stuck is that they had gotten sidetracked by comparisons with others. I know that from a biblical scholar’s viewpoint the last line of the Luke reading is classified as a reversal saying, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Jesus frequently reminded people that human expectations were often reversed in God’s realm; the first shall be last, and the last, first, etc. Those who exalt themselves should take warning. But I’ve been toying with hearing this line as a kind of promise as well as a warning. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. If one of our spiritual goals is to see ourselves, humbly, as one of the many people of God, not particularly better or worse than any other, then this could be a hopeful promise. It’s a promise that those who struggle with over-inflated egos as well as those who struggle with over-deflated egos may be restored to the great middle ground of God’s people, available for whatever God needs them to do. The tone of the text from 2 Timothy lends itself to this holy middle ground. It strikes me as the words of a person who is well-grounded in his identity as one of God’s people who has tried hard to be of use. He says he is being “poured out as a libation,” which means he is surrendering his life’s work and energy, his skills and talents to God’s purposes. He feels a sense of satisfaction over nearly finishing the race, fighting the good fight, keeping the faith. But it’s not a race he’s winning against other opponents; it’s almost like a solo marathon in which he has extended himself but for God’s glory rather than his own. He does mention the crown of righteousness that he expects to be awarded, but lest one think he’s winning some kind of prize that no lesser mortal gets, he hastens to say, “and not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing.” I love the way the author of this letter, Paul or one of his admirers, captures an evaluation of his life that doesn’t depend on whether other people think of him as successful or not. In fact, he speaks in later verses about being deserted by his former supporters, but where he might have expressed bitterness about those disloyal losers, he writes, “May it not be counted against them!” He also avoids swallowing the critique of his work their desertion implies; he doesn’t apparently second-guess his own mission based on their lack of support. He’s grounded in the strength God gives him, not in the approval or disapproval of others. Returning to Dag Hammarskjold’s journal, listen to the way he expressed the goal of being grounded for himself: Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is – is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement. To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and the importance in your bearing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance. Towards this, so help me, God.[2] I really appreciate the way Hammarskjold has expressed the paradox of losing oneself in order to fully offer oneself for God’s purposes. If one is not bogged down or distracted by constant self-evaluation (either high or low), one can be more fully available for God’s work, offering oneself as a gift, embodying one’s full weight and importance to the task at hand. I don’t know how you might have been thinking about yourself lately. Maybe you’ve been more like the Pharisee, looking down on the masses of ordinary folk and counting yourself lucky to be better than they are. Maybe you’ve felt more like the tax collector, miserable, useless, mired in sin. Maybe, like most of us, you’ve felt both ways, even in the space of an hour. Whether your spirit is in need of humbling or exalting, God’s grace is available to you. God can help you downsize a towering ego, climbing down from your lonely exalted pedestal to take your rightful place in the community of God’s people. God can help you grow a squashed soul, offering forgiveness and healing so that you may climb up from the isolated quagmire of sin in which you’ve been stuck to take your rightful place in the community of God’s people. Towards this holy middle ground where we can be of use to you, so help us, O God. [1] From Markings by Dag Hammarskjold, translated from the Swedish by Leif Sjoberg and W. H. Auden, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. [2] Ibid |